Largest Laplacian Eigenvalue and Degree Sequences of Trees

Tuerker Biyikoglu, Marc Hellmuth, Josef Leydold

Published 2008-04-17Version 1

We investigate the structure of trees that have greatest maximum eigenvalue among all trees with a given degree sequence. We show that in such an extremal tree the degree sequence is non-increasing with respect to an ordering of the vertices that is obtained by breadth-first search. This structure is uniquely determined up to isomorphism. We also show that the maximum eigenvalue in such classes of trees is strictly monotone with respect to majorization.